


my dearest darling (please love me too)

by secretsarenotforfree



Category: Dirty Dancing (1987)
Genre: F/M, Ficlets, Happy Ending, History? What American History, No Knowlege of the 60's and 70's, and then it turned into a monster, basically i saw this movie for the first time five days ago and it took over my brain, i could not rest until i wrote something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:35:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29394885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretsarenotforfree/pseuds/secretsarenotforfree
Summary: It’s hard to close her eyes when the smell of Johnny is going straight to her head, but she does it, for him and them and the damn dance they’ve got to do, and somehow, it works. He counts between them low and steady like a secret, and when his feet move hers do too.
Relationships: Johnny Castle/Frances "Baby" Houseman
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	my dearest darling (please love me too)

**Author's Note:**

> so what happened? you might be asking.  
> well i went 23 years of my life without watching dirty dancing and then i saw it four days ago and i've lost my mind. this is the best cinema to exist and i've seen it six times already. a perfect film. PERFECT FILM. i love these two dancing kids sm and there's like nothing in this fandom so here's my CONTRIBUTION.
> 
> i did absolutely no time period research at all because american history sucks anyway and the filmmakers and such said it takes place in a 1963 that doesn't exist and i fully embrace that way of thinking. i fudged the ages a little because i can, so baby was 19 during the events of the movie and johnny was 23. baby's birthday is late in the school year, which you didn't ask but i hope is clear in the fic lol.
> 
> title from 'my dearest darling' by etta james
> 
> while i wrote the last part i was listening to 'isn't this a lovely day?' by ella fitzgerald and louis armstrong and i think it really fits it so please listen while you do. or don't, y'know, just a recommendation.

She’d never wanted to go to Kellerman’s, for the record.

She’d been against it from the very start, planning on having a strictly relaxing summer before college and real world started in the fall. Baby deserved that, didn’t she? Some time to maybe process that things were changing and she didn’t feel like she’d had yet at all. All this, and the vote had been rigged against her, she was sure. Because they were going, and she’d limited herself to three books, and resolved to find _something_ to do while she and her hair experienced the weighty Carolina humidity and heat. 

What it was she was going to do, Baby hadn’t exactly figured out an answer to that last one. But she’d find it, even if she had to commit to something like bird watching.

She didn’t know how to feel about feeling directionless even though she was headed in one.

At least Billy seemed rather decent. He wasn’t headed for Harvard or Yale or anywhere covered in ivy but he cracked pretty solid jokes and treated her like a real person. That’s more than she can say for a lot of people she knows back home, or here.

So of course, when she’s wandering somewhere she shouldn’t and she sees Billy struggling with three _watermelons_ of all things, Baby asks why. The music sounds amazing and she’s never been great at corralling her curiosity about things that piqued her interest. She _can_ keep promises, no matter what Lisa thought - she was just never given very many to keep. 

Okay, well. This was _definitely_ a secret she was going to keep. Because Baby had never seen two people moving like this not even once in her _whole life_ and she could not look away. She'd only been at Kellermans for a day, or two, not long enough to recognize anyone other than their slightly skeevy waiter and her father's old patient, the owner, but she knew without a doubt that the talent that had been hiding in the workers that operated in the background for guests like her would never be forgotten by her again. The line between them, unseen but not unfelt, blurred here in the slightly sweet smelling smoke and bodies that moved in all kinds of sensual ways. There was barely an inch of distance between them anywhere to be seen, hands roaming and eyes locking and an understanding that Baby couldn't wrap her _own_ head around. 

And then _he_ comes back. Live and in person, with less space between them than ever before. No quietly open balcony window or expanse of a dance floor with endless restrictions, now. It's not the first or the second time that she'd seen him, but it felt fresh all over again laying eyes on him now.

The powerful creative freedom he radiated, an energy shared by every crew member in the room, was spectacular. Penny was stunning, of course, willowy and elegant and Barbie doll-like with a glow all her own, but Baby couldn't take her eyes off her partner. Somehow, he was even prettier closer up then she'd even guessed he could be. That beautiful, passionate hair, eyes that stayed brilliant blue through the heat and smoke, and the absolute joy and skill he showed in his craft. He was mesmerizing. He was captivating. He was sensual. He was avalanches of words that Baby had long since decided wouldn’t happen to her, descriptors she had put away in the hopes of settling for what had been a rather ordinary life so far. 

“That's my cousin, Johnny Castle. He got me the job here.” Billy’s voice is a little hoarser when raised like this, just loud enough to be heard over the rousing beat. On the dance floor, the most captivating man she’d ever seen moved with Penny like second nature, gorgeous and passionate and just the right kind of controlled wild. Baby hadn’t meant to, but all of a sudden she burns quite green with with envy because she’s positive that the blonde dance instructor has got to be the luckiest girl in the world.

“They look great together,” she offers, doing what she’s sure is a very good impression of nonchalance without even a whiff of disappointment.

“Yeah.” Baby’s companion tucks his hands under his armpits, Kellermans t-shirt pulling tight. Somehow the records they’re playing sound better than anything she’s ever heard in the main ballrooms, complemented by the buzzing of the summer right outside the doors, a southern staple of itself. “You'd think they were a couple, wouldn't you?”

The world shifts again, for the second time in a space of a few minutes, which is two too many for Baby. “Aren’t they?”

Billy shakes his head, watching the two on the dance floor with her. Johnny and Penny continue to move like they’re communicating in a language only the two of them know and its colored red hot. “No, not since we were kids.”

Baby doesn’t think she could ever dance like that with someone she’s only _used_ to care about, but then maybe that was just her. She was more than happy to accept the news that, well perhaps all hope was not lost, and stranger things had happened. Eventually, man would go to the moon. Her father wouldn't beg off the commitment and retire one day. Baby Houseman was a nineteen year old independent young lady and could probably manage at least _speaking_ this Herculean man who really was making her night with the amount of buttons undone on his shirt. Even if she wasn’t quite sure why buttons of all things were adding more heat under her collar. She knew her hair was frizzing like mad, her dress stood out like a pastel pale sore thumb in cotton and she hadn’t taken a full clear breath of air since she’d stepped inside, but Baby did not care. Especially when Johnny was taking those magic movements closer to the two of them and maybe, perhaps, she could almost feel her heartbeat speeding up.

Johnny comes over, accuses Billy of doing, to be fair, exactly what he had done by bringing Baby with him, and Baby’s brilliant response is that she carried a watermelon. The instant his back is turned Baby repeats it to herself and proceeds to mentally call herself seven kinds of idiot. 

She didn’t expect him to pull her out onto the floor with him a few minutes later, but how was she supposed to resist? She knew Johnny had caught her watching him. She knew that if she didn't follow his gentle tug to the dance floor she'd regret it for the rest of her life. And Baby also knew that she had enough regrets already, even if she was young, and this wouldn't be one of them.

She didn’t expect the blazing heat of his hands on her waist everytime he brushed her into position, the slip in his tone so different from before as the teacher in him came out, the barrier in him that thinned just a bit simply because he was showing her something.

It’s hard to make her hips go the way her brain wants them to, but it’s not so much so when Johnny tells her to “Watch, watch my eyes,” and Baby lets the heat lay on her skin and those perfect, ocean blues guide her. She could’ve sworn that there was a tether, conventionally intangible but very much real between every other dancer she’d seen on the floor, and something in her chest sparks at the thought that one could happen between them too. Which, through her doubt, does, when she lets her head go and her arms dangle around his damp neck and his moments lead hers. Johnny's leg slipped so strong between her own that it's too easy to lean against it and let it lead her as well, and there's a curious fire to all of it. The locked eyes, the bounce, the dip, the pressing on her toes to stay even with him, the wonderful freedom she'd seen on his face when he'd stepped out onto the worn wooden floor now something she could barely taste too. 

Baby feels warm from her head to her toes in a way she's never felt before.

When she twists and he's gone, that feeling still bubbles between her ribs, sparkling and special like the very first sip of champagne her mother had let her try at her high school graduation only a few months ago.

She wants very badly to have it back again.

* * *

Johnny’s mother had passed away when he was too little to hold on to more than a couple memories.

He was four when a particularly bad pneumonia took her from him and his father. Sarah Castle had been stop and stare beautiful, with long dark curls and a laugh that lit up the entire house. Johnny’s father didn’t take the loss easily. He couldn’t see how the love he’d lost for his wife still needed to be given to the song hat they’d made, and sunk himself into his work instead, dropping Johnny off at his wife’s sister's place whenever he could use his work as an excuse. The Costecki’s, Billy, his two younger sisters, loudly arguing and loudly loving parents became the closest thing that Johnny knew to family. 

He would do anything, anything at all to keep from going back to the cold, empty house he shared with his father. ‘Home’ couldn’t be a label of a place with so much dead air and broken heartedness still sticking to every surface it could. Johnny felt closer to the family record player than he ever did his dad, and he filled up the noiseless grief with it whenever he could. 

Dancing, well. It’s hard to listen to music and not want to move along with it, and Johnny liked the openness of it. The way that even if you didn’t have a partner, somehow whenever once danced you were a part of something bigger. Everyone’s used their body to express joy at least once in their life. Johnny just couldn’t think of a _better_ way to show the happiness that should and could be.

If temperatures hadn’t been Arctic like when it came to James Castle, they dropped below freezing the evening Johnny came back from being out all night with Billy and their friends and he announced that he was going to a dance instructor tryout.

Eyes just as dark and blue much less full of life, regarded Johnny at the kitchen table. Sixteen going on seventeen, head full of hair and dreams, fidgeting in the doorway like he’d done something wrong. The two Castle’s were built differently - something on the inside, something on the outside. Different materials, both missing the only thing that had made their broken family work.

“I should’ve known.” 

It’s gravelly and low, disappearing into a cup of whiskey, and it’s the only thing James would say. Three words, sinking to the bottom of Johnny’s stomach and reeking of disappointment, breaking the young man's heart all over again.

They never speak of it again.

Billy goes with him to the audition, flirts with endearing earnestness with the girls in line while he waits, and full on tackles him when Johnny comes out fighting a smile. “I knew it. I knew you’d do it Johnny.” His equal partner in crime despite the lost inches between them when Johnny had hit his second growth spurt and Billy hadn’t, he won’t stop crowing about it all the way home. Aunt Emma bakes him a whole tray of his favorite blueberry muffins and they all dance in the living room afterwards.

Just like always, it makes the silence of ‘home’ just a bit easier to bear.

A year and a half of studying and practicing until exhaustion rode his every bone and he dreamed of the steps and the patience, and it all pays off when he gets that certificate. He’d met Penny at the beginning of classes, their easy chemistry and fierce loyalty making their pairing seem like it would be just as simple. That turned out not to be true, but their loyalty remained. It hurts to leave Billy behind, but the life of a dancer was hard. They didn’t want him to come along with nothing solid waiting for him.

Calling him to tell him about the job at Kellerman’s is one of the proudest moments of Johnny’s life. It’s not perfect, and it’s only seasonal, but it’s something. And something seems like enough for him until Billy gets sent to pick up the watermelons quietly put aside earlier for the staff evenings by the staff themselves.

* * *

The first thing she can remember, that really leaves a mark on her other than normal happenings, in its own funny way, was the dancing.

Not the kind that would come later. That would change her life. But a sweeter, more innocent kind, of standing on her fathers toes and being spun around the living room. Baby’s mother had always loved records, and they'd played this particular Nat King Cole song enough that even at six she could hum along to every word. Baby's dad made her feel like she was flying on those clouds of stardust the song crooned to them and she never wanted it it to stop. They took out ice cream as a treat and it wasn't even Baby or Lisa's birthday and let them stay up late. 

With every ounce of certainty she possesses, Baby didn’t think life could get better than this.

* * *

He doesn’t realize, not in any way that counts, how absolutely doomed he is until they’re on stage at the Sheldrake and Baby’s solution to their botched lift was to start swishing her skirts and acting like the cutest fool that he’d ever seen in all twenty three years of his life.

Baby did a damn good job, handful of mistakes or not, and Johnny’s proud of her. He’s proud of her in a way that to a lesser degree he is used to when it comes to his pupils, but it’s separate from that. He’s proud of the brave, stubborn way she turned herself into a dancer just so Penny could go to her doctor's appointment, he’s proud of her courage in every missed step she’d made in front of all those people, he’s proud of everything she remembered and everything she didn’t. She shone brighter on that stage than every piece of jewelry on their audience combined, and Johnny’s fucked. He’s completely messed up, because he’s half in love with a guest named Baby and nothing can possibly ever happen between them. Ever.

Every single time he almost kissed her, had to be stricken from his mind. Completely. Because it couldn’t be.

Except, on the drive back, Johnny realizes that when he’s been looking, maybe Baby’s been looking back too.

When he helps her out of his car, the broken edges of his back car window sparkling in the lamp posts, Johnny’s hands curl around hers and he thinks that he’s not sure if he’ll be able to let go.

  
  
  


* * *

They never stop dancing like a dream.

Or maybe, they never stop dancing in her dreams, either. Baby’s not quite sure which one it is.

What she does know, is that she’d been facing Mount Holyoke with varying amounts of dread and it had subverted at least half of her expectations. Most of her classes were engaging, they had a truly stupendous set kitchen staff, and she got along decently well with her housemates. Eleanor, her roommate, was just as forward thinking as her, and they had heavy conversations deep into the night like Baby hadn’t had with another woman since her mother or Penny. 

Baby has a certain amount of confidence in becoming a paralegal. She’s smart, and focused, and has a talent for seeing things that other people didn’t. Being able to work in a legal sector that helped those the world had arbitrarily considered less than, well that Baby was certain would take a bit more finagling. Not that she was anything but determined about it, because she was.

The dreams thing, well that was bound to happen when the best job Johnny was able to rangle together after the Kellermans season had officially ended took him roughly a hundred and two miles from her. Baby thought Massachusetts was alright in all, but it took a sore hit when it didn’t have a Johnny Castle in it. Any state would, with a deficit like that.

“Don’t ever stop writing to me, Johnny Castle.”

It’s early enough that the mid morning warmth is far from lifting the slight chill. Baby’s sociology class, the first of the day, starts in an hour, and from where she leans against the windows twice her size the hall in front of her is filled with girls in various stages of readiness. She can tell by the roughness of his voice across the phone that he’s been up late practicing again and hasn’t gone to sleep yet. She’s over the moon for him that he’s getting to choreograph, a contract position to help a community theatre group put on a better production of their spring musical, but Baby knows he can often lose himself in his passion a little too much. She would’ve already reminded him to try and take care of himself if she wasn’t heartened by the fact that Penny was staying with him for the time being.

“You say that like I could ever stop, Baby.”

If she closes her eyes and wishes really, really hard, she can pretend he's whispering it in her ear. It's not enough, but it's enough for now. "Any progress on the pieces?"

"We're mostly done. Just have to tweak the opening and closing numbers, cut down on the amount of fancier moves while still making it look good."

"So they're not good dancers?"

"Passable."

Baby translates that from Johnny Speak to mean they made for in enthusiasm what they lacked in talent. She looks down at her feet, tiny white sneakers still worn impossibly at the toes from her summer dancing, and wonders how she came to be in love with man who can make her miss him with just her _shoes_. "You have a favorite yet?"

Johnny hums, low and warm enough to reach her even through all the machinery and magic connecting them. "None like you. Their knowledge of whose dance space it is is lacking at best."

It's a foolish, girlish thing to smile about but Baby's core is still very bubblegum pink in its brightest parts. He asks her about her psychology courses, and how her first projects were going, and listens to each reply just as intently as he does an important song for the first time. He had a young heart and a serious soul, her Johnny does, anger at the world and love for so many of its people. Contrasting points, all of him, like his leather jackets and his dancing shoes. Baby loves every part. The missing is still there, tucked in the lack of his warmth close to her, the itch in her fingers to touch his hair and only the ghost of contentment touching her in the wake of his absence. 

She hasn't seen him since the dinner they'd had with her family two nights before she moved onto campus. It had been tense, and more than a little uncertain, but music had saved them all. Johnny's tentative, but knowledgeable questions about her father's meticulously chosen collection had opened wider the crack in the door of father Houseman's heart that had opened that transcendent night at Kellermans. It was needed and necessary and put in place some seriously needed groundwork, but she'd wanted more. So much more time with him than she had. 

He'd promised her that he wouldn't come to visit until they had officially started rehearsals because they both knew she had a particular talent to distract him utterly. Even when Baby was trying to help him with possible steps, responsibilities seemed to slip from their grasp when they were in each other's arms. Baby still stands by the reason for it, but that doesn't make her want him here any less. 

When he says "I love you." at the end of the call, it tastes enough like an _until tomorrow_ to keep it just as bittersweet as Baby can take.

"I love you too." She presses her fingers to her lips, softly, and blows him a tiny kiss. A deep sigh leaves her lungs at the click of the phone, and Baby let's herself be mopey for a minute or two until shaking back her shoulders. Using the perfect posture her mother taught her and Johnny perfected to get herself up and moving again.

It would be okay. Baby knew it wasn't forever. For now, though. Sucked, just a bit.

* * *

He was more serious about this than she thought he would be.

It’s easy, easier than she’d anticipated, to find love for every person who lived and spun magic on the other side of the sign. Cora teaches Baby how to put on just the right amount of lipstick, Andy shows her which property cats are nice enough to sniff your hand, Beatrice tells her how to brush your hair just the right way after the shower, and Baby gets close with them all, when she’s not with Johnny. When she’s not with Johnny, she’s hanging with Penny or the other coworkers and walking behind the scenes and finding little ways to grow up. When she’s with him, it’s all she can do to just _be with him_ and try to learn at the same time.

She figured that her crush on him would be more human and therefore more manageable when his hands were on her almost every moment and this was no small deal. Through her amounts of ire of Johnny utterly dismissing her as an option before, Baby hasn’t done anything more complicated than a single box step in her life. She is very very lost and she doesn’t have nearly as much time as she’d like to. Baby’s a prepper. She studies and reads and goes over information to such a degree that it’s a part of her before any sort of testing can happen. So this sort of thing has her a little up in arms. Anxious awareness riding her spine every time her back isn’t straight enough or she doesn’t go on the two or she steps on his feet.

Baby gets frustrated easily, but Johnny keeps it all behind the curt edge of a tone and a demand to do it Again. 

He’s serious about this, she realizes about the same time she’s started to take it just as much as he. His dancing is his passion and his craft and it’s important to him. It’s somehow just as important as the fact that Baby learns _right_ and not just for their performance, and she’s honored by that a little bit. That no matter what, she can take what he’s taught her through the rest of her life, even if it would always feel so staggeringly of him

Baby is learning to dance, sure, but she’s also learning Johnny. The muscle in his jaw that flexed whenever he was near forcibly keeping his honest thoughts back, how he didn't like talking about any family that wasn't Penny or Billy, the mark of each beloved scuff mark on the dancing shoes he couldn’t near bear to be parted from. Billy and Penny bring a bowl of pilfered fruit to one of their practices and she finds out strawberries are his favorite fruit when the four of them snack on the wooded stairs. Johnny smells like black coffee and fresh cut grass and she feels like swooning even when she’s got her eyes locked with his and her feet are actually doing what they’re supposed to. 

“Not on the one, it’s not the mambo, it’s…” Johnny searches, endless blued and expressive, for the right word he’s looking for and even if Baby wasn’t supposed to be paying attention she didn’t think she could look away. “It’s a feeling. A heartbeat.” She watches, doe eyed and willing, when he presses those big hands to his chest and taps out a beat every living person has, whether they’re tuned into it or not. Baby tries it on herself, mentally cancelling out the slight speed her own had added at the still new nearness of him, but it doesn’t work. She’s still off, a little, she knows it and so does he.

“Don’t try so hard.” He takes her hand in his, heated fingers and calluses that have run demanding and instructive all over her for the past couple of days, and presses it against his chest. It’s hard to close her eyes when the smell of Johnny is going straight to her head, but she does it, for him and them and the damn dance they’ve got to do, and somehow, it works. He counts between them low and steady like a secret, and when his feet move hers do too.

When Baby opens her eyes and he tells her that she’s doing good, pleasure distracts her enough for a real, loose smile on her face. 

“Yeah, you got it, Baby. Two, three, four, keep it going.” For the first time, she doesn’t ruin it in the space of a few measures, and it’s enough to spark a grin of Johnny’s own.

Baby starts thinking that you know, maybe they can pull it off.

* * *

He's cute, when he's jealous.

It doesn't happen often, because Baby's taste for dancing is limited to her friends and family and one very talented man named Johnny Castle, but the one time it does during her time at college it tickles her a bit pink. He surprised her, coming up for her birthday weekend when he'd fibbed a bit and told her he had a teaching booking at a convention and would send her a present since he couldn't be there. Turned out, the present was Johnny himself, a revelation that Baby's entire dormitory discovered when the strings of an old Solomon Burke classic floated up from a 57' Chevy and the most levelheaded girl on the junior year floor shrieked and tore out of the building like her heels were on fire. 

The prettiest man Fabray House had seen all semester, probably all year, caught Frances Houseman with more grace than anyone expected from his dark glasses and boyish smile. They kiss long enough and deep enough that the house chaperone has to make herself heard over everyone's tittering and remind Baby that she wasn't alone.

There's a carnival at the college that weekend, a year end celebration of exams, and Baby couldn't wait to take Johnny. She gets herself a new skirt, periwinkle light and swishing right above her ankles, and wears her white tennis shoes for good luck. His arm is warm and heavy and real around her shoulders, tugged right by her own hand, and Baby is beyond happy. 

She loves carnivals for whatever reason, the funnel cake and the bright lights and maybe, okay not the clowns, but she could deal. Everything is more vibrant and fun when Johnny is at her side, and he’s having a good ole time. He’s winning her a teddy bear and trying whatever fried thing Baby dares him to try and sneaking his hands across her ass and inappropriate nuzzles in her neck. He sways with her to a carefully seated waltz on the ferris wheel and tugs her into the hay maze so he can get her into a corner and have his way with her. _Bonus_ points for them both when she was the one with one hand buried in his dark locks and the one snaked between the slightly scratchy hay and Johnny’s shapely rear and _he’s_ the one pressed against the structurally unspectacular walls.

(The man who’d changed Baby’s life had always insisted he wasn’t as good at words as her, but he seemed to do perfectly well in moments like these. When Johnny completely forgot there were other people in the world than he and Baby and just let love for her wash over him. He cups his hand on her cheek and strokes his fingers through her hair and whispers things about how the summer is right around the corner and he’s never been happier because everything’s missing when she’s not with him.)

He apologizes, multiple times, for not being able to get her something as impressive and fancy as she deserves, but he was in a leaner time than they had encountered before and he’d really had to save for this trip. Johnny was competing for a coveted teaching position at one of the best dancing schools in New York and he wanted this, wanted it more than he’d ever want anything in a long time that hadn’t been her.

Baby wants it for him too. Wants it badly enough that it and her love for him manage to transcend the knowledge that broke her heart again and again of how far away from her he was. It too, was farther than they’d ever done before, and it was making every moment of this even sweeter. Even more special. There’s a petting zoo and Johnny’s charmed by the baby lambs in about two seconds flat. The sight of him, squatted down, dancing shoes kept together through sheer love for the craft alone, grey t-shirt and heart eyes for a little bleating thing, wraps tight around Baby and overflows the part of her that loved him. Somehow, Johnny was still utterly magnetic to her doing the smallest thing, and she thinks that’ll never change. Even when they don’t move like they used to, lines decorating them as Life Happens, Baby knows to her core, to her very bones, that stretch or tremble, this love between them could be counted on.

So too, could his distaste at seeing another man's arms around her.

She remembers, mixed with the deep shame and displeasure for the way Moe was treating him, the curious dip in her stomach when the other mans dance steps had for a second fell in beat with hers. The record scratch, so loud in an already tense moment, had been more telling that it hadn’t, even if she and Johnny were the only two that saw quite all of the nuances.

There’s big tent with a dance floor at the back of the carnival, and kids mostly Baby’s age and a little older are enjoying the music. It’s far from the first Baby and Johnny have stepped onto, but it’s the first in a long while she's at for a moment alone when the song sinks into something slower and Johnny isn't back yet from relieving himself. One of Baby’s lab partners, a sweet guy who had never made an advance on her and whom she counted as a friend, asked her to join him for a bit.

“Just until your boyfriend gets back,” he teases her, and Baby laughs at the smile lines next to his deep green eyes. Wesley had a bad case of the spaghetti arms, but he did respect her dance space. “Where’d you find a guy like that, by the way? That's the kind of guy my mother would say they don’t make anymore."

Baby smiles, secret and special. “Where I wasn’t supposed to be.”

There’s a little bit of a cleared throat, and Baby gives her full attention to the man whose presence her body had already clocked. No one made her react like Johnny did. Wesley drops her hands immediately, dips his head and salutes him. “No harm, no foul. Have a great night you two.”

That little muscle in his jaw ticks and Baby rolls her eyes long and loud. “Johnny. Please.” It’s exasperated, but it’s a little fond too when Johnny takes her hand with a palm just a touch damp from being washed, and leads her to the floor. He pulls her tight and they line up perfectly as they always do, her hand cradled in his against the heart that beat for her. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Is that so.” Johnny turns her in a loose circle with just the slightest movement of his body and Baby’s so attuned to it that she barely notices. He’s cute, when he gets a little pouty and possessive and making her stomach do little somersaults at the reminder that he thought of her as his as much as she did with him.

Baby levels with Johnny’s ocean blue gaze, her eyebrows drawing together. “Yes, it’s so. How could you ever think I’d want another partner when I have you?” Color rises in his rugged cheeks, but his hold on her never changes. His fingers splay on her hip and slide up to the middle of Baby’s back, an emotion she’s seen too many times on his face winking in his eyes, self doubt and consciousness of a worth Baby would never understand why he couldn’t see. “Johnny...sweetie. Tell me.”

They’re so close that Baby fancies she can feel the expanse of his lungs when he takes a breath. “Maybe part of me is still worried that you can’t be happy with someone like me. Not forever.” To his credit, Johnny doesn’t stumble over the word forever. When he told her under those rosy lights, lifting her on the night they would both remember for always, that when doubts came in they would have to fight harder, he meant it. Even when his view of himself was one of those things they would have to fight.

She twists a strand of his dark hair between her fingers, studies him. Baby didn’t know about him, but she’d searched her soul many a time since she’d fallen for him. She’d known for a while now that there wasn’t a single atom or molecule in her body that would stop loving him today, tomorrow, or any day, and that was where her head was at. Where her heart was at. If anyone was going to get left, heart broken and shattered, Baby had always secretly thought it would be her. Gutted by the moving on of Johnny’s affections to someone taller and blonder and a better dancer than she. As long as Baby had something to do with it, if they broke it would _never_ be the other way around.

“If you asked me to marry you right here, right now, I would say yes.” There’s something big stuck in Baby’s throat and it tastes a lot like her love for him, but every word is only filled with truth. A pause touches them both, a look too deep to have a name on Johnny’s beautiful face. “Maybe though, don't do it when the guy in Psych 310 who eats erasers is a foot away from us?”

Baby startles a laugh out of him, breaking the weighty magic of what she’d just said, but it doesn’t break the grin on her face. “But I would. So stop worrying about what I’m saying yes to, and start worrying about how you’re going to ask me to. Okay?”

  
“Okay, Baby.” Johnny kisses her, right there in front of the people she’s going to leave behind in a year, and Baby can’t wait to push through her last exam. She can’t wait to move her things into his tiny New York apartment and find an internship for the summer and to live with this man that she’d loved for three years now and never planned on stopping. She licks into his mouth just because she can and he’s buttery under her tongue like the popcorn they’d shared, and she can’t _wait_ to get used to this.

* * *

He’s bare chested and beautiful in front of her, something trapped in those lungs that rise and fall while Johnny gazes at her, and Baby thinks it’s a powerful thing to feel wanted.

She’s kissed boys before - she’s held hands with them too, a couple times, but on general she’s never liked one enough to think of doing it again. They were all well and good, or at least seemed to be enough so for Lisa, but for Baby, none of them had clicked.

Now she knew it was because none of them were him.

All those shallow-emotioned deadends, telling her nothing about the supernova burning in her future, wearing dancing shoes and a wounded soul and a look on his face that Baby thinks she’ll remember for the rest of her life. She thinks that every inflection of the way he initially tried to hold back from her will be imprinted on her soul for the rest of eternity, much like the devastatingly simple scorch of his first leading touch right above the empty loops of her cream jeans, somehow different from the all times before. Johnny’s hips dip low, tender and questioning, and Baby has no want for his hesitation. Her back is arching even before she knows she’s doing it, his grip shifting to her ribs to give her all the support she needed, and Baby thinks maybe the best thing about dancing is that it speaks when language fails. 

When she was little, bored in the waiting room while her dad got ready to take her to lunch, Baby would read medical dictionaries back to back just for fun, but she doubted she could remember a single one of them to describe this feeling. Nothing would be able to capture the masculine gravity of his thigh leading her slight dip, the way it felt to tighten her arms around his neck and take a deep breath of his scent at the crook of Johnny’s strong neck. Baby’s wondered about what his strong hands would feel on her butt for so long that when it first happens she’s too high on nearness to really comprehend anything but a deep ache for it to happen again.

Baby doesn’t think she’s never trusted another person more in her life and wonders, somewhere far away, if her fears would come true. That she would never feel anything, ever again, with another person if it wasn’t him.

Johnny hasn’t held a woman to him with so much care in...ever, maybe, he thinks.

Penny and his dancing was different - she was his dearest and best friend, the only steady in his life other than Billy, his family and yet not. As long as it was in his power Johnny would protect Penny, and be the support system for her that he’d never had, but he’d never _longed_ for her.

He’s never felt like the whispers he’d heard back at the academy about every dancer having a true partner weren’t just filled with malarkey. Like perhaps things would always be right, and make sense, if Baby was there. Like it was his privilege to hold her close like this and know that was exactly what Baby wanted from him. Like she was telling him something with the skim of her lips, electric and light, against his back, every bold caress of her perfect fingers telling him that she didn’t want to wait anymore. That what she wanted, despite it all, was him. And all Johnny wanted to do, more than anything in the whole world, was _give_ it to her. And he did.

She can’t stay the night, they both know that, but when Baby’s smile slips quicksilver gone behind her in the click of his door at the wee before morning hours Johnny doesn’t take he’ll breathe until he sees her again.

* * *

In a rather shoddy case for his own defense, Baby had tried to tell him to sit down first. 

Stupid him, he hadn't listened. He’s been at the Breyer Academy for Dancing for two years now and has started to build himself a stellar reputation. Johnny wasn’t used to having something so steady and dependable, but he truly loved the work. Teaching had been his calling, his greatest passion besides dance, and after so long he got to do both those things. Those, and many more that he was very much looking forward to.

The casual intimacy of their Tuesday night was already struck through with a note of urgency with the wedding in barely more than a week, but Johnny refused to let it stop him from cooking for her. Baby's Tuesdays always seemed to be the roughest of the week of the law firm she worked at, as if everyone's sins took the weekend and the day to catch up with them. The firm she had been working for for the past two years had a tendency to pick up as many pro bono cases as they possibly could, and the workload was always intimidating. They were good people, at the end of the day, they brought each other coffee and worked as a team, and Baby thinks she'll stay there for a good while, at the very least. 

For smart people, they still hadn't realized that the devastatingly handsome man who seemed to live his life in home tailored dress pants and couldn't wait until they were through the front door to nuzzle his fiancee's neck when they went to lunch wasn't just calling her "Baby" as a term of endearment. She'd come around to using Frances in professional places, Frankie with newer friends, but she would always be Baby. 

It was Baby when Penny found time to breathe from raising the twins she'd gotten from her lovely dentist husband and talked Baby's ear off in her and Johnny's small kitchen. It was Baby when she went to Cora's baby shower and Baby at Lisa's graduation from the fashion institute, and Baby when Johnny crooked his finger at her and told her to join him on the floor as if he even needed to ask.

Either way, Johnny was doing his damnedest to make her a kosher lasagna and she just had to tell him that she was about ninety nine percent sure that she was pregnant _now._ When he had a _knife_ in his hands.

He's so dumbstruck with it it slips from his grasp the wrong way and there's a nick and it looks worse than it is, surely. 

"Johnny!" Baby's yelling at him a little, her hair a little golden brown curled poofy halo that ruffles at her yank of his arm to get him close to their sink so his wound can get washed out.

He just can't stop staring. "You're pregnant? You're having a baby? _Our_ baby?"

"Well it's definitely not anyone else's, honey." 

Johnny is frozen enough to let her fuss over him enough to get a paper towel pressed right to his now clean little slice and then it all comes bursting out of his heart and soul and he's swinging her around the kitchen. The radio tunes in to whatever frequency of happiness the two lovebirds are on and spills out a song that croons to them of their life to come. It spins put a rhythm they fall into in an easiness born of the countless dances that they'd shared.

"My Baby's having our baby," leaks between his kisses, romantic words that match the cant of their hips as they sway together. Her navy turtleneck is no match for Johnny's hand slipping underneath it, needing to feel her skin. The thick gold around his wrist grounds her like it had in his cabin what feels like all those years earlier and his eyes shine as their future.

She smooths back a bit of his hair, too focused on him to notice the tiny glint of the amber in her engagement ring. "You think they'll be a little dancer too?"

"I couldn't imagine otherwise."

Johnny reminds her how exactly their happy (early) accident came to be with enough dirty dancing to have them both sleep dreamlessly that night. When they spin, seamlessly and effortlessly, across the floor about a week later, there's a special bit of care that stays between them both. Baby is a vision in white embroidery and billowy sleeves and the two of them glow to the tune of Frankie Valli and not an attendee at their wedding day can't take their eyes off of the happy couple.

Her parents cry, Lisa toasts to them from a seat she shares with the first boyfriend of hers Baby has liked in a long time, and Billy leads the bridal party in a chorus of They're Both Jolly Good Fellows before the ceremony started that they're going to remember with incredible fondness for the rest of their lives. They crush glass with feet that danced them into love before either of them fully knew how deeply they would feel, and just like that, they never have to let each other go.

  
Baby thinks that Johnny might not be a perfect man, but he dips her low with hands she knows will never let her fall in front of their whole world, she knows he's the perfect man for _her_.

* * *

Their first morning dance tells them that _Cry to Me_ hadn’t been a fluke. Hadn't been just a rare magical moment where everything changed and Baby knew she would be able to divide her life into a before and after that night.

Baby makes up a lie about a crack of dawn canoeing expedition and gets out of bed at an hour so early that even the Catskills are flirting with cold. She tugs on a dark pink shirt that hangs loose to her hips and her trusty shorts and nearly trips tying her shoelaces on her way out the door. The only people she sees other than half a handful of guests are her friends, and she waves to them all in their uniforms and does her best not to scramble too eagerly to Johnny’s cabin.

By the time she reaches the door Baby lasts approximately half a second on the stoop before Johnny’s scooped her by the waist inside, pressing a kiss to her lips so sweet that everything he just taught her about proper form and straight backs flies out the window and she turns to goo in his arms. “Hi,” she’d said a bit breathlessly, tracing the line of his brows, the cupids bow of his lips, the strong planes of his cheekbones. It’s still freshly heady, this ability to touch him like this, and Johnny doesn’t seem to be immune to it either. 

“Hey, Baby,” Johnny answers softly, singing just the slightest bit, annihilates her personal dance space to Baby's great happiness, and presses just the slightest bit at her upper thighs in a gentle hint. She leaps into his arms and he carries her the rest of the way to his bed like she’s made out of every precious thing in the world. 

Weak light glows into the rise of the sun before their feet touch Johnny’s wooden floors again. This time, all Johnny’s got on is his briefs, and Baby is swirled in sheets stolen from his bed. She’s got her hands twisted in the front of extra fabric, cuddled into his bare chest, and Johnny’s holding her just as close. Nudging a kiss to the top of her burnished gold head, nestling her tight against him, marvelling at the new pleasure of _her_ in his sheets and wondering if this was the pinnacle of his life, because nothing could be better than this.

The tiniest touch of his finger and Baby instinctively reacts and burrows further in the direction opposite, not even opening her eyes as they sway. Disbelief mates with the calm and tender after feelings of their second time together and Johnny decides then and there that he wasn’t going to take a single moment of this for granted. This was a gift, all of it - her, and the dancing, and the emotions he knew were growing deep in the parts of him that he hadn’t let anyone else reach.

“Hey. You.” Baby tilts her head up, catches his chin against a gentle kiss. “Stop thinking so hard and dance with me. Not on the two, listen for the guh-guh.”

Johnny brushes his thumb up her exposed spine and Baby’s last syllable gets lost against their lips. He doesn’t think she knows how rare it is, that a good thing like her happen to a schmuck like him, but at the very least she doesn’t need to know it now. Baby’s right, as she usually is when it comes to anything _but_ dancing. “Am I doing better now?”

“Much. Who says the teacher can’t be taught?” She hums, rising on her tiptoes, and a handful of fabric looses from her grip and puddles to the floor when her now free palm to hold tight to his neck to keep him to her. Johnny thinks he’ll remember this when they’ve both been gone for years and years and only their time remains. 

He couldn’t think of anything better.

**Author's Note:**

> no one asked me, but i think they have a daughter for sure. her parents teach her how to dance and they look cute as hell together and i'm RIGHT, there would be an uncle penny and an uncle billy and sjgskg okay shutting up now.


End file.
